Where wealth and poverty rub shoulders

Published 6:28 pm, Friday, May 3, 2013

As far back as the 1990s, former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. was talking about "The Two Connecticuts," the extremes of wealth and poverty that exist in the state and, as was his focus at the time, their effect on public education.

If anything, even sharper lines of distinction have been drawn in the intervening years between The Two Connecticuts.

Nowhere, of course, are those lines more sharp and visible than in tiny Fairfield County, where the rarefied, rhododendron-lined lanes of, say, Fairfield's Greenfield Hill are literally minutes away from some of the poorest neighborhoods of Bridgeport.

In such confined quarters, where there's no avoiding the real people who inhabit these different worlds, the disparity poses challenges for all of us, wherever we may be on the spectrum.

Over the last few weeks, Hearst Connecticut Newspapers have been putting faces on the topic with a series titled "Inside The Great Divide": the single mother of four living in public housing in Greenwich, the immigrant from Bangladesh who's become a Danbury real estate impresario, the Bridgeport Bassick High School long-distance runner, and the owner of a small business, a brewery, in Stamford.

They're all trying to make it in a landscape littered with problems -- but also with opportunity.

Each story is different, but each instructive in its own way.

The news is not all dire. There's no denying the opportunity achievable through hard work.

Consider the tale of 50-year-old Mohammad Rafiqul Alam, who immigrated to this country in 1983 from Dhaka, the impoverished capital city of Bangladesh. He started off working 15-hour days in a Manhattan deli while he studied English and computer science at a community college.

Today he runs his real estate business from an office in the 5,000-square-foot mansion he built in Danbury in 2006 for $1.3 million.

Or Conor Horrigan, a 31-year-old Wall Street refugee, who is applying his business acumen to running a small business, the Half Full Brewery, in challenging economic times.

Cities like Bridgeport and Danbury have long been the blue-collar cousins at the Fairfield County family table.

The stories have shown in vivid and human terms how poverty and wealth exist side by side. Whether the question at hand is education, health care or jobs, the stories should be reminders to all of us, and especially to policy makers, that we all have a stake in building a fair and equitable society, one, certainly, that rewards hard work, but one that also doesn't foreclose the American dream to any of our residents just because of the circumstances of birth.